Department for Work and Pensions

Social Security Benefits

baroness lister of burtersett: To ask Her Majesty's Government when they expect to publish the evaluation of the lower benefit capthey stated would be published in Spring 2019 inthe letter from the Minister of Family Support to the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee dated 18 December 2018.

baroness buscombe: Work on the evaluation of the lower benefit cap is ongoing. The impact evaluation uses a complex methodology that must first isolate the impacts of the lower cap from the original cap, and then analyse how these impacts differ across geographical regions and household types. It is important to ensure that the methodological approach is robust, and the Department has contracted the Institute for Fiscal Studies, independent experts, to advise on the evaluation design and peer review the results for the duration of the project. Work is progressing well, but in order to ensure that the evaluation design is as rigorous as possible we have decided to extend the timeframe over which we conduct the analysis. The impact evaluation findings will provide crucial context for the interpretation of the other strands of the evaluation; the claimant survey and local authority case study research undertaken by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). The full evaluation will be published when the peer review of the impact evaluation is completed; we now anticipate this to be in Autumn 2019.